I'm astounded at how these climate crisis radicals refuse to acknowledge how essentially racist and sexist they actually are. — Merkwurdichliebe

Are they?

That damn shifty polar vortex — Merkwurdichliebe

Ain't that the truth?

Climate is a logocentric tool of oppression created by the white colonialist patriarchy! — Merkwurdichliebe

Or it's Marxist. Depends on which direction the polar vortex is blowing.

Well said, thanks. Meaning normativity opens up into ideas about rationality. If we reject meaning normativity theses, do we end up also rejecting our common sense ideas about rationality?

Who exactly is 'denying climate'? — Tzeentch

Climate is a word that plays a part in language games, but it would be a mistake to think it has a foundation beyond that. That's just rank foundationalism.

There's a scene in the movie 200 that comes to mind with regard to climate change narratives. It's about Xerxes, who is about 20 feet tall for some reason. Did you see it?

The bird race that feeds on the insects.?.? — Merkwurdichliebe

The birds died out when Yellowstone blew up. The insects keep bird fossils in their museums.

They give rise to the bird race! — Merkwurdichliebe

the what?

The most believable bullshit always has a kernel of truth. It is propaganda 101. And anytime i see alarmist bullshit being utilized to centralize power and impose greater control over the multitudes, i get real suspicious. — Merkwurdichliebe

Insect supercolonies don't have this problem. It's why they end up taking over the world.

Is that possible in the slightest. Parents can barely impart their ethics to their children. Maybe if time travel were invented. But that would mean it has already been invented. — Merkwurdichliebe

The human race could split it two. One branch lives underground and stays technologically and intellectually sophisticated. The other branch lives on the surface and has reverted to stone age life. The people who live underground have a static social order and they routinely blitz the surface dwellers so they can never advance and start doing crazy stuff like burning coal. This goes on for thousands of years until Yellowstone blows up and initiates the Age of Insects where ant supercolonies develop intellectual sophistication and pizza that isn't fattening.

The topic is not as cut and dried as the official narrative portrays it. — Merkwurdichliebe

How do you know?

That makes sense. The human lifespan is less than 100 years. And within that time everyone has plenty of problems to deal with on a daily basis, which makes it hard to justify the investment of limited time and energy on a problem that is predicted (rightly or wrongly) to arise after you are dead. — Merkwurdichliebe

Exactly. Imagine that we manage to end fossil fuel use. In a thousand years humans have forgotten that we did that and they go back to using coal and petroleum. Transmitting an imperative to people a thousand years in the future is just beyond anything we've ever done.

If you take a class in global warming at a university, they go over this. It's part of comprehending the true dimensions of the problem.

Draw 57 tally marks. Ask the skeptic how many there are. If the answer is "57", draw 68 more. Have the skeptic count them all. That should be a good enough answer for him. — RogueAI

The problem generalizes so it encompasses all language use. One imagines that you create meaningful speech by following certain rules. The Private Language argument suggests that this isn't what's really happening.

If you're interested, I'll eventually fill out details about meaning normativity, and then move further along in Kripke's work to describe his own thoughts about where we land after considering the challenge.

Then I ask you to prove tI've been doing quaddition, not addition. — Patterner

I wouldn't be able to. Someone else brought up objections as if the question is about what one can prove with regard to rule following. It's not about proof. It's that there is no fact (a situation existing in the world) that signifies which rule you followed.

It probably would have helped if I had explained the basics of meaning normativity first, then set out the challenge. But I'm stuck now trying to get my head around the ins and outs of that. It's a pretty thick topic.

You want a magic bullet (fusion) so you don't have to do shit, a government to do shit for you, a religion to convince others to do what you won't do out of free will — Benkei

I've long believed fission and fusion will be a significant part of addressing climate change. The challenge today is that coal is cheapest way to beef up a power grid, which is why China is building two coal driven power plants per week this year.

You can force nuclear power with laws, as is happening in the US. A fission plant is being built near me, actually. But laws come and go. Supply and demand will have a bigger impact over time. Fusion would reduce the demand for coal, natural gas, and petroleum without the environmental impact fission has.

What I contribute is less than the global average and I set aside about 3% of my income each year to finance further reductions. Isolate your home maybe get some solar panels, ompartimentalise your heating system so you only warm rooms you're using, use a bike to get around, consume less, buy second hand, torch all advertisement. You'll save money, get healthier and be happier. It's not new or ground-breaking. In fact, it's all very easy unless you're poor. That's really the only excuse to do nothing. — Benkei

That's great. I also live a low consumption life. One of the systemic problems people overlook is the way we use plastic. Organisms that eat plastic have evolved. That means going forward, that plastic waste will contribute to greenhouse gases. So what's the alternative? I mainly think about that with regard to medical equipment which is pervasively made of disposable plastic for infection control reasons. We could transition back to glass, but guess what power source drives most glass production? Natural gas.

So solar panels are a great idea. They're subsidized by my state. But you can't make glass with a solar panel. Globally, we should be working to transition to fission and fusion. That would actually do something about the problem.

The real problem is people like you insisting the problem is too big, too difficult, too whatever reason you can dream up to do fuck all. It's just moral weakness. — Benkei

Actually, I brought up fusion, a global government, a new global religion, and other ideas. What did you contribute other than being a gnat in my face?

What is your core criticism countering my claim that Marcuse's philosophy underlies the official climate crisis narrative? — Merkwurdichliebe

The end-of-the-world narrative is an Indo-European motif. The climate crisis is Armageddon. Capitalism is the Antichrist. I'm talking about the emotional form of it, not the scientific part.

The US and Russia have this oddity in common: particularly potent forms of the Armageddon myth were social drivers in each culture. The idea of global nuclear war emerged from a conflict between entities who were both already steeped in dreams of the end of the world.

That doesn't mean the end isn't really near. In fact the world is ending all the time. And that's what it's really about: time.

Any good textbook on global warming will have a section on the philosophical challenge of climate change: that this problem will always be with us as long as coal is around to burn. As a species, we have no experience addressing a problem that extends beyond about a hundred years. This problem extends for thousands upon thousands. The real problem is time.

In the US, it's George Vanderbilt. He started the world's first forestry school intended to teach loggers how to harvest wood sustainably. But he brought some guy from Germany over to teach. I guess it must have started there originally.

I know one guy. When Mikie has completed his answer.

Who are the key pioneers on the notion of sustainability? — Merkwurdichliebe

Who is it?

Yay!

I'm sorry, I don't think I understand your question. — flannel jesus

We know that water makes fins. Could there be environments that make DNA?

I see what you're saying. But could DNA be like the fins at a lower level? In other words, certain environments give rise to DNA?

I think hypericin might be right. The more you look the outcomes of convergent evolution, the more it seems likely that an alien might actually be something we would recognize.



here

I'm sure you wouldn't catch so much heat if you would only speak as a malcontented little prick like the rest of the doomed apparatchiks. — Merkwurdichliebe

:lol:

Well I'm single handedly changing the climate so it's similar to what they have on Venus, so taking a little flak is the least I can do.

Exciting for some scientists and a lot of fans. — Vera Mont

I think it would be huge philosophically. This same exoplanet has methane and CO2, so it might have an ocean. Wow!!

The only way Communism could only succeed in creating a sustainable world be by regressing civilization back into the stone age. — Merkwurdichliebe

Bronze age economies were kind of like communism. But yes, it's a world where nothing ever changes. There is no innovation.

Thanks for the feedback. :up:

I wouldn't see it unless it's in the NYT or something. But did you see this? The JW telescope may have detected a molecule on an exoplanet that is only made by living things on earth. It still needs further confirming, but that would be incredible!

I don't mean to nitpick, but unsustainability is to capitalism, as sexism is to patriarchy, as racism is to white imperialism...woe to the oppressed. — Merkwurdichliebe

What do you mean? Capitalism can't help but be unsustainable?

We're not fucked, the human race isn't fucked, so let's fuck the next xx generations. You're a sad case you know that? — Benkei

I'm sorry you feel that way, but I'm not surprised that you do. It's like you hate my guts or something.

I’m not at all certain. I make the choice not to dwell on the idea that we’re probably screwed. It’s useless and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. — Mikie

There's another option, though. If by "we" you mean the human race, it's most likely going to be fine. Climate volatility may take out the present world order. I think that's likely. But world orders come and go. We'll be back a few thousand years from now, and probably more capable than ever.

If by "we" you mean the present generation, again, we'll probably be fine. Our knowledge puts us in a position to know that we're saying goodbye to a world, while it's still here. This vibe, which dwells on the fragility of life, is like this:

It would surprise me if you're right, but then I'm a little out of touch.

Would poor voter turn out help Trump or Biden?

Sometimes when someone tells me that I apologize. (A serious joke.) — Fooloso4

:up:

I don't know what might stand as an orthodox reading today but, to quote Marx:

Whatever it is I'm against it
(Groucho) — Fooloso4

:razz: I don't know how philosophers are seeing it today either. I think of the orthodox reading as having come from Cambridge in 1927 or something.

What I like about your view is that it makes me think. My own view is like just analyzing the chessboard. Yours is more like actually playing the game. Very different approaches.

Well, something along those lines happens when we say that little Jenny can count. — Banno

:up:

Hmm. What is a pattern, if not some sort of rule-following? OR perhaps, there are two ways of showing that you understand a pattern - by setting it out explicitly in words, and by continuing it.

So here's the problem. Consider "101010..."

Someone says "you are writing a one followed by a zero, and you intend us to understand this as continuing in perpetuity"

Someone else says "The complete pattern is "101010010101", a symmetrical placement of one's and zero's".

A third person says "The series continues as "101010202020303030..." and so on, up to "...909090" and then finishes".

Our evidence, "101010...", is compatible with all of these, and much more besides.

It's not the absence of rules that is puzzling, it's their abundance. — Banno

Right. Kripke isn't saying there's no such thing as rules.

Yes, explicit rules are in a way post hoc. — Banno

I guess the question is whether rule following is something we sort of stamp onto certain kinds of events?

Of course, the sceptic might object to S's reliance on non-demonstrative evidence or on memory beliefs in particular. But this kind of objection will give rise to a sterile form of scepticism, as one of the ground rules for any useful exchange between the sceptic and the non-sceptic is that justifying empirical evidence need not be demonstrative evidence. Insisting on such evidence, if only for the sake of argument, S might challenge the sceptic by asking what he means, or intends, by 'quus'. Further, the present sort of objection certainly will not provide us with a new form of philosophical scepticism; at most it will provide a traditional kind of epistemological scepticism to which recent philosophical literature provides some plausible replies. — Paul Moser and Kevin Flannery, Kripke and Wittgenstein: Intention without Paradox, pp. 311-12

It's not clear from this passage that the authors have ever heard of the private language argument.

Food for thought. Your take is a little unorthodox, but that's fine.

Since my purpose was to focus on normativity, I'd say the take away is this:

Crito says that the foundation of normativity is the well-being of human social groups. So there's an element of selfishness to it, but it's not what I want. It's what we need to survive.

Do you give your life that your city might live? According to Lincoln, yes, you do.